A non-partisan political blog for people who care about Israel and want an end to the Arab-Muslim war against the Jews in the Middle East. Michael Lumish, PhD, editor. - mike.lumish@gmail.com - Doodad, Oldschooltwentysix, JayinPhiladelphia, Empress Trudy, Geoffff, and Sar Shalom Contributors.

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Friday, February 15, 2013

Ignorance of the Well-Intentioned

The following video, entitled "HAMAS," popped up on my radar not so very long ago, thanks to StandWithUs. It was made after the defensive action by Israel in November, 2012, to stop the rockets indiscriminately shot from Gaza at Israel's civilians, a war crime expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention and Protocols.

The video reverberated with me for several reasons. As one who follows current events, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, and observes discussion and comments on the internet and in gatherings of well-intentioned people, it is striking to recognize how much is grounded in ignorance. This does not mean that these people are ignorant per se, but that the information possessed about history and facts is fragmented, skewed and inaccurate. This leads them to adopt positions that are suspect and may not conform to their underlying principles.

For many, it is hard to see because in their circles, like most circles, people seek out the conventional views they agree with and generally hear little of what differs, or they dismiss what differs without ever listening. One need only look at Washington, DC to see where it is leading us. It's something called the Mutz paradox and it should be a lesson to all that deliberative democracy needs diversity of opinion to work best.

I hope you watch the video, especially if you are a progressive that supports human rights for ALL peoples and individuals. Perhaps the questions asked in the video will sound familiar. Will the answers reveal anything? Just how much do you really know about the conflict, the events, the players and their intentions?

In morality and law, is confronting aggression the same as engaging
in it? Is it so hard to make the distinction?

Are calls for genocide illegal? Who are the victims of these calls? Are they entitled to support and even protection? Imagine if someone wanted to exterminate you and your loved ones and so many just shrugged it off as the Hatfields and McCoys.

The bottom line is that there actually is a difference, but for too many it just does not matter, due to ignorance that permits a bias to form, one which seems to blur the ability to discern which side of the human rights debate one is on.

"...Is it familiarity or indifference that produces invisibility? In the case of antisemitism it may be both. One of the reasons why people today reject the charge of antisemitism is because, as mentioned, it is largely defined by Auschwitz in the Western imagination. If one is not prepared to physically attack or attempt to harm Jews one can safely remain aloof to the charge of antisemitism. In Western culture, the beliefs many people still hold about ‘the Jews’ are not seen to be antisemitic (read genocidal) but are simply felt to be reflective of day-to-day reality. In other words, what some of us identify as antisemitic ways of thinking most people see as simply reflective of a reality in which Jews are in fact wealthy, in fact powerful, in fact connected to one another, and in fact work together (or conspire) to protect their own communal and individual interests, which today include the fate of the State of Israel. Again, this is not new but fully consistent with classical forms of European antisemitism, in which antisemites point to 'reality' to illustrate Jewish power, conspiracy, materialism, criminality, or whatever negative association they want to affix to 'the Jews.' And the 'reality' they find then reconfirms their pre-existing antisemitism, as it does today. After almost 2000 years of indoctrination, which has worked very hard to fix the Western imagination—and our individual attention—upon this abstract collective called 'the Jews,' we should not be surprised to discover that Western culture is riddled with antisemitic perceptions and habits of thought about the Jewish People. And this complex invisible reality has not been exorcised by the Holocaust. Negative beliefs and attitudes about Jews are so normal and so ingrained in Western perceptions and attitudes that people—both gentiles and Jews—are simply unable to recognize them for what they are. Like a second skin, antisemitic thinking has become invisible to most people...."

-- Western Culture, the Holocaust, and the Persistence of Antisemitism, Introduction YIISA Seminar, Yale University, 5 March 2009 Dr. Catherine Chatterley University of Winnipeg (Canada), Department of History

YIISA (Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism) was founded in 2006 and was was shut down in 2011. It was shut down in accordance with, and as part of, the anti-Jewish bigotry that is discussed in this talk by Catherine Chatterley.

"Before WWII, the Nazis and their sympathizers made popular all over the world the allegation that ‘the Jews’ controlled everything in secret, including the mass media, and that they would use this clandestine power to hurt us all. The accusations were widely believed because they were built on a long tradition of Western accusations against the Jews going back to the first century, when they were accused of killing God: a cultural inertia (see Part 1). The Nazi accusations of the supposed clandestine total power of ‘the Jews,’ plus supposed evil intent of the same, produced a pan-Western anti-Jewish hysteria that fueled the genocide of more than 5 million Jews, which repeated the consequences of similar accusations in previous centuries in the West (see Part 1). We are back where we started. It is almost impossible to be both alive and in the West and not have heard the allegation that “the Jews control the media.” As before, the accusation is a lie. This piece will demonstrate that most of the big media is not controlled by ‘the Jews,’ and that when people claiming a Jewish identity do own a big media company, this company will be especially careful to take an anti-Jewish slant."

-- The modern "Protocols of Zion" - How the mass media now promotes the same lies that caused the death of more than 5 million Jews in WWII - Part 7, by Francisco Gil-Whitehttp://www.hirhome.com/israel/mprot7.htm

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Why is there the outrageous cowardice, and outrageous myopia, among Jewish people that prevents them from standing up for their own people and which prevents them from even seeing the outrageous -- genocidal -- now global -- current bigotry against their own people and the resulting danger to their own people?

Because:

The Psychology of Populations under Chronic Siege, by Kenneth Levinhttp://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-046-levin.htm

The Paradox of the Jewish Mind, by David Solwayhttp://pjmedia.com/blog/the-paradox-of-the-jewish-mind/?singlepage=true

It's time for Jewish people to stand up. Jewish people will stand up for any and all other groups of people who they view as being victims. However Jewish people have always been aversive to so standing up for their own unparalleledly, unsurpassedly, wronged people. It's time for Jewish people to stand up for their own unparalleledly, unsurpassedly, wronged people. It's time for Jewish people to stand up for their own endangered people. It's time for Jewish people to actually be decent. Not worshipers of their own egos in trying to prove how "good" they are. Not cowards who are afraid of being hated by culturally Christian-European people and by Muslims and by Arab people for standing up for their own people by telling the truth. But actually to be decent. To stand up for the actual most wronged and most endangered group of people -- their own people -- the Jewish people. And to do so not out of a cultural-self-identity view. Rather, to do so out of decency.

We have absolutely got to stop giving non-Jews the impression that the Arabs of the Middle East have every right to murder us because they are fighting for the "national liberation of the Palestinian people."

Whenever we talk about "Occupation" with a capital "O" we've already told them that they have every right to launch rockets at the Jews of Israel.

The aggression against the Jews in that part of the world has been ongoing for 14 centuries. I sometimes refer to the "long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East" which is a concept that, unbeknownst to myself, I share with Harvard Professor of Yiddish Studies and Literature, Ruth Wisse.

The Jews did not start this fight and we've never wanted it, but it is embedded in the Koran and we are outnumbered by a factor of 60 or 70 in that part of the world.

And, yet, as a matter of "social justice" and "human rights" Europeans think that we continue to deserve a good ass-kicking.

It is immoral. It is wrong. And we have got to stand up against this.

Instead our tendency is to gaze into the Jewish navel and wonder about how we've wronged the people who continue to blow us up in the Jewish city of Jerusalem.

Barack Obama on the so-called "Arab Spring" (May 19, 2011):

"There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat."

The "Arab Spring" was the brutal rise of political Islam in the Middle East and this is what Obama compares the Civil Rights Movement to?

The Fundamental Argument:

The progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, creates and supports venues that demonize and defame the Jewish state, thereby also creating hatred toward the Jewish people.

Such venues include political journals, such as, but not limited to, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian, numerous universities throughout the United States and Europe, various NGOs with an anti-Israel agenda, and the entire progressive-left movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) the Jewish people of the state of Israel.

These venues and organizations do not generally criticize Israel, but dehumanize that country.

For this reason, among others, the progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, undermines the well-being and safety of Jews around the world, sometimes resulting in violence toward us.

Therefore, as a matter of common sense and basic human decency, Jews should leave the progressive movement and the Democratic Party as we seek to build alternative political structures that are not home to toxic anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, who would see us robbed of self-determination and self-defense.

What You Can't Discuss:

This is a partial list of taboo topics within progressive-left venues around the Arab-Israel conflict. You cannot discuss this material because it undermines the "Palestinian narrative" of perpetual victimhood. This narrative is a club used by the Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel, along with their western progressive allies, to delegitimize that country in preparation for its eventual dissolution.

1) The centuries of Jewish dhimmitude under the boot of Islamic imperialism.

2) The recent construction of Palestinian identity, its connection to Soviet Cold War politics, and how this is an Arab people with a Roman name that refers to Greeks.

3) Arab and Palestinian Koranically-based racism as the fundamental source of the conflict.

4) The ways in which contemporary progressive anti-Zionism serves as a cloak for gross anti-Semitism.

5) The Palestinian theft and appropriation of Jewish history.

6) "Pallywood."

7) The historical connections between the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Palestinian national movement.

8) The perpetual refusal of the Palestinian-Arabs to accept a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one.

9) The progressive portrayal of terrorists as those fighting a righteous war of "resistance."

10) The Arab-Palestinian indoctrination of children with Jew hatred.

11) Human rights violations against women, children, and Gay people in the Muslim Middle East.

12) The fact that violent Jihadis call themselves "Jihadis" and claim to love death above life.

This is only a partial list, so please let us know the many more that we are missing.